The main idea of the fix is to add handlers to elements that do not bubble events that perform the bubbling by calling jQuery.liveHandler.

The main other points are:

A document handler on activate event that hooks input/form/texarea elements (it is guaranteed to happen first).

An expando (live4IE) that identifies the list of event handlers for the activated element allows to cleanup on blur (or deactivate if focus was not triggered).

A safeguard cleanup is performed as a defensive measure.

That's a lot of code for inclusion in the core. AFAICT, though, IE8 doesn't fix any of the event bubbling issues so there is a chance we'll be dealing with it for several more years. Maybe you could release it as a plugin and see what level of interest there is for making this consistent?

I though about this but it feels kind of odd to make a plugin just for one browser class (aka IE). My impression was that the event delegation provided by the 'live' feature was just missing the last bit of IE support to be complete (supporting the commonly expected event types across all browsers).

As it stands, in a separate file, this allows to do a conditional include and only pay for that network load when "confronted" with IE but I agree this is un-jQuery-ish.

        <script src="jquery-1.3.1.js"></script>
        <!--[if IE]>
        <script src="live4IE.js"></script>
        <![endif]-->

I can try to shorten the code if you think this would help ("only" adds 3% to the total load now though).

Let me know & advise.

This was implemented in 1.4.